About

Lauren Benton is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. She is a comparative and world historian whose research focuses on global legal history and the history of European empires, particularly British and Iberian empires. Benton completed her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and holds an A.B. from Harvard University. Her work examines the effects of legal conflicts on global and international orders, with her most recent book, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence, analyzing imperial violence between 1400 and 1900. Her previous works explore constitutionalism in empires, histories of imperial sovereignty, law in slavery and abolition, and the legalities of piracy. Benton has conducted ethnographic research on the informal sector and economic development in Latin America and Spain. She has received numerous honors, including the Toynbee Foundation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and membership in the Institute for Advanced Studies. Benton has held faculty appointments at New York University and Vanderbilt University, where she served as dean of humanities, dean of the graduate school, and dean of arts and sciences. She served as president of the American Society for Legal History in 2019-2020.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• History
• Physics
• Philosophy
• Ancient history
• Mathematics
• Thermodynamics
• Mathematical physics
• Medicine

Selected publications

• The Problem of Limited War: Vitoria and Schmitt on Imperial Violence

  2026-03-12

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• How Not to Possess an Island: Pitcairn and the Legal Circuits of British Empire in the Pacific World

  Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales (English edition) · 2025-04-29

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  Abstracts Historians have been remarkably incurious about the legal dimensions of “informal empire.” This article shows that legal practices in fact created and sustained sovereign indeterminacy. Our focus is Pitcairn, a small, remote island in the Pacific settled in 1789 by a handful of Britons and Tahitians after the mutiny on the Bounty . British officials, legal professionals, island sojourners, and historians have advanced a jumble of claims, each attached to a particular timeline, about how Pitcairn became British. One prominent view is that a single British navy captain took possession of the island in 1838. We challenge this and other prevailing accounts by showing how repeated reconfigurations of island-imperial connections kept Pitcairn from being either enfolded into the empire or established as an independent entity. Intermittent visits by British naval officers gradually constituted a makeshift legal system, while rival factions of islanders steered imperial agents to support local schemes, including bids for island rule. For a century and a half, these processes held Pitcairn on the threshold of the empire. The significance of the narrative recounted here extends beyond one small island. This microhistory illustrates broad processes of interpolity ordering and locates the origins of sovereign indeterminacy in the “legal circuitry” of nineteenth-century empire.

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• Kate Stevens. <i>Gender, Violence, and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific, 1880–1920</i> Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. 304. $35.95 (paper).

  Journal of British Studies · 2025-01-01

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• Chapter 2: Conquest by Raid and Massacre

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-02-09

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• Conclusion: Specters of Imperial Violence

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-02-09

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• A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the &amp;#x2028;Inter-Imperial Caribbean

  Past & Present · 2024-10-30 · 1 citations

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  Abstract Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a &amp;#x2028;circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order.

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• L’art de ne pas posséder une île

  Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales · 2024-12-01

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  Les historiens ont fait preuve d’une étonnante indifférence à l’égard des dimensions juridiques de l’« empire informel ». Cet article montre que les pratiques juridiques ont en réalité créé et soutenu une indétermination de souveraineté. Nous nous intéressons à Pitcairn, une petite île isolée du Pacifique, peuplée en 1789 par une poignée de Britanniques et de Tahitiens après la mutinerie du Bounty . Administrateurs britanniques, professionnels du droit, voyageurs et historiens ont avancé un enchevêtrement de revendications, chacune liée à une chronologie particulière, sur la manière dont Pitcairn est devenue britannique. Une des thèses qui ressort de ces controverses est qu’un capitaine de la marine britannique aurait pris possession de l’île en 1838. Nous remettons en question cette version ainsi que d’autres récits prédominants en montrant comment les multiples reconfigurations des liens entre l’île et l’empire ont non seulement empêché la première d’être absorbée dans le second, mais également de devenir une entité indépendante. Les visites intermittentes des officiers de la marine britannique ont progressivement constitué un système juridique improvisé, tandis que des factions rivales parmi les habitants de l’île ont orienté les agents impériaux dans le soutien de projets locaux, y compris des tentatives de prise de pouvoir sur l’île. Pendant un siècle et demi, ces processus ont maintenu Pitcairn au seuil de l’empire. La portée de cette histoire dépasse largement le cas de ce minuscule territoire. En nous appuyant sur une étude micro-historique de Pitcairn afin d’éclairer plus largement l’agencement des relations entre entités politiques, nous montrerons que cette souveraineté indécise a pour origine ce que nous proposons d’appeler les « circuits juridiques » de l’empire au xix e siècle.

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• Bibliography

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-02-09

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• Empire, Nation, and the International in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Atlantic

  2024-05-20

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  Abstract This chapter explores the emergence of the international at the complex intersection of imperial, national, and treaty law in the nineteenth century. Highlighting the case of the Flor de Loanda, a slave ship caught near Rio harbour in 1838, the chapter reveals the improvised and fragmented interface of multiple legal regimes as the British Empire sought to assert its interests and police the Atlantic slave trade against Portugal and Brazil. The case shows not only that nothing like a coherent system of international law existed as actors used legal arguments from competing legal systems and jurisdictions, but also that an understanding of nineteenth-century international order cannot be derived purely from the doctrines of the law of nations. Rather, the Flor de Loanda case shows that, in order to understand international ordering in the early nineteenth century, we must pay careful attention to endemic jurisdictional disputes among empires and emerging nation-states.

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• Rights and Empires

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-28

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Frequent coauthors

• Carolien Stolte

  Leiden University

  202 shared

• Gijs Kruijtzer

  198 shared

• Kris Lane

  Tulane University

  198 shared

• Martine Julia van Ittersum

  198 shared

• Willem Klooster

  198 shared

• John Gommans

  Hawke's Bay Hospital

  173 shared

• Om Prakash

  173 shared

• Charles Reed

  Lahore University of Management Sciences

  141 shared

Awards & honors

• Toynbee Foundation Prize for significant contributions to gl…
• George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Camb…
• Berlin Prize fellowship
• Guggenheim Foundation fellowship
• Membership in the Institute for Advanced Studies